Trump's Call For A 'Space Force' Could Transform How America Wages War

Loren Thompson
, ContributorI write about national security, especially its business dimensions.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

President Trump is a political force of nature who refuses to be hemmed in by the bureaucratic status quo. He proved that again Tuesday when he raised the possibility of creating a Space Force to oversee U.S. military efforts in space. Not a space command or a space corps, but a Space Force.

To quote the president, "we have the Air Force; we'll have the Space Force." The implication is that he expects the nation to one day have a separate military force dedicated to space, just as the Army is dedicated to warfare on land and the Navy is dedicated to warfare at sea.

Although he didn't stipulate when such a force might be come into being -- it won't be next year -- the president may be on to something. There has been much talk in military circles recently about how space and the electromagnetic spectrum are emerging as distinct warfighting domains, just as important as air, land and sea. Military planners talk incessantly about "cross-domain" warfare.

President Donald Trump speaks during an event at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego on Tuesday. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg

However, the emerging warfighting domains don't get anywhere near as much attention from the military services as their traditional arenas of combat. It was that kind of resistance to change that led air power advocates to propose splitting the Air Force off from the Army during the years leading up to World War Two, and eventually every industrialized nation had an independent Air Force.

Air power then began to get its due in military deliberations. In fact, once nuclear deterrence became the centerpiece of national strategy, the U.S. Air Force was elevated to first among equals in military councils. Today, though, space advocates will tell you that the Air Force is playing the same role the Army did in the 1930s, restraining its best minds from thinking imaginatively about how to cope with the emergence of new warfighting challenges and domains.

It's not that senior Air Force officers are unaware of the gains Russia and China are making in space. They just don't want to throw much money at the problem, because they are overdue to replace Cold War air fleets. They also don't want to spend much money on missile defense of the homeland, another area where the president is likely to find his thinking at variance with the military status quo. Air Force leaders are more favorably disposed to offensively-based strategic deterrence.

So of course they will argue that President Trump's comments about creating a Space Force are premature, given how limited U.S. capabilities currently are in space. But proponents of a separate service wouldn't be wrong to suggest the idea will always be premature as long as current military spending priorities prevail. Those priorities basically dictate that space shall be used to support traditional forms of warfighting.